The deployment of wireless local area networks (WLANs) has recently experienced explosive growth as multiple applications and services now demand high throughput networks. A WLAN, such as an IEEE 802.1n system, includes modulation and coding schemes (MCSs) for a transmitter to employ to transmit data to receivers in the network. To transmit the data to a receiver, the transmitter selects one of the MCSs to modulate, encode, and transmit the data over one of the communication channels in the network. Typically, the selection of the MCS is made through a probing process in which communication of data is iteratively attempted at different bit rates until a working bit rate is found. The iterative search of the MCS, which is the current scheme deployed in most WLAN devices, has been found to be time-consuming and unable to adapt to fast varying channels since there may be a relatively large number of different bit rates that may be attempted before the working bit rate is found.